Paper products are being employed more frequently in the production of temporary or disposable garments, particularly for use in hospitals and for medical examinations. Their use is expanding because it is less expensive and more convenient to employ temporary or disposable garments, rather than to have to handle, store, and launder permanent garments.
Such temporary garments must meet a number of requirements. First, they must have sufficient strength to stand up to production, handling, and wearing. And second, for aesthetic reasons they must resemble cloth in hand and drape.
These two requirements are sometimes inconsistent with each other. For instance, one of the ways to increase strength in paper products is to incorporate therein a binder. As a general rule, strength is directly proportional to the amount of binder used. But there is a limit to the amount of binder that can be used because the binder will begin to bond to itself when its proportion in the paper is increased beyond a certain point. The result of such self-bonding would be an aesthetically undesirable stiffness or boardiness in the paper. Unfortunately, with many unreinforced paper products, at the highest proportion of binder that can be used because of aesthetic considerations, the strength is not adequate for use in disposable garments without employing 3 or more plys of paper, or the equivalent thereof by using extra heavy paper. Therefore, any means that can be found to increase the strength of such paper products, without making the paper stiff or boardy and without adding significantly to its cost, would be commercially desirable.